Kin and country: Genealogically informed interactional analyses of person reference in an Australian Aboriginal community
| Panel: | P51 - CA in Non-Western settings: Review and conceptual challenges |
| Author: | Blythe, Joe |
| Abstract: | |
| In large societies, kin terms are available for reference to only a small proportion of persons in the social universe. In small societies with classificatory kinship systems, conversationalists may use kin terms to refer to higher proportions of the population. In the Aboriginal community of Wadeye in northern Australia (population ~2500), kin terms are available for reference to every individual because every person knows each other and knows how each other is related. In addition to memorizing extensive genealogies, each adult knows the manner of association of every other to particular tracts of country, and to series of ritual songs associated with those tracts of country. All the Aboriginal residents of Wadeye speak the Murriny Patha language. Even when Murriny Patha speakers choose not to use kin terms, the relationships between individuals are centrally important. The importance of the kinship system can be seen in the grammaticalization of “siblinghood” across all free and bound pronoun paradigms of the language. Thus when referring to groups of individuals, in addition to person, number and gender, conversationalists need to consider whether the group is comprised exclusively of siblings (real or classificatory), or whether the group includes members who are (real or classificatory) “non-siblings”. Thus free pronouns and cross-referencing polysynthetic verbs – like kin terms – are referential expressions that draw on the kinship system for their efficacy. When CA practitioners discuss fragments of talk-in-interaction from western societies they generally provide the ethnographic backgrounding relevant for their analyses. If kin terms surface in their transcripts, analysts invariably provide the relevant genealogical information. In Murriny Patha conversation, kin terms surface very frequently, as do other kin-based referential expressions (pronouns and verbal cross-reference included). Even when kin-based expressions are not used for reference to persons, the alternatives need to be considered in the light of their always being available for reference to every individual. As a result, the analyst is compelled to support the interactional analysis with genealogies connecting the persons referred to in the transcripts to the participants in the conversation. In this paper, I will demonstrate the incorporation of micro-genealogies into the micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction. |
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